Tweetflight is an interactive Twitter-powered music video which uses real-time tweets to display the lyrics of the song as the viewer watches. It received over half a million views, and awards and accolades from Google (both for Google Sandbox and Chrome Experiments) Awwwards, The FWA and Qantas’ SOYA.

I Will Never Let You Go is a WebGL-powered music video that surreptitiously captures footage of each person watching and lets them add themselves to the video. Endless strangers, responding together. It won awards from The FWA and Awwards, and made some of my friends pretty uncomfortable.

The Beginnings & Endings Project, an interactive world map that tracks the distance a song has travelled and rewards fans for participating. So far the song, Preflight Nerves, has travelled 1,102,477km, which is more than three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between making music and experiencing it. Because music is expensive, I’ve focussed on the digital over the physical. For my forthcoming LP, One For Sorrow, Two For Joy, I want to create something equally incredible that exists in analogue.

I am going to produce a stunning clear 12″ vinyl that does justice to my most personal and powerful record yet, and continues the themes of collaboration and interaction that have been the backbone of Brightly.

A mock up of the A2 poster.

One For Sorrow, Two For Joy is an 11-track LP featuring collaborations with Nicholas Lam, Joshua Barber and Tom Lanyon (of Ceres). It has been mixed by grammy-nominated engineerAndrei Eremin, and it will be ready to master by the end of February.

I’m incredibly proud of the record we’ve made together, and I want to use it to extend the ideas that I have explored with my earlier projects. For a limited run of 8, I’m going to integrate your face into the album artwork to create a unique one-off artifact.

I’m also going to feature the names of every pledger with the package.

Here’s one I prepared earlier!

The problem is that it costs a bunch of money to produce a record.

Not the recording or the mixing or the engineering (although that bit is admittedly expensive), but the actual production bit. I adore vinyl, and I had a chance to release a short run of the songSarah on a 7″ vinyl.

The previous 7″ single, Sarah.

Through that experience I’ve gathered some of the best people in music behind me, including the aforementioned Andrei Eremin, and I’m working with a number of tried, tested and trusted suppliers to produce it. I’m pulling out all the stops on the design and production, and I can’t wait to make it a reality.

The songs are ready to go, having been recorded in Iceland, England and Australia. They’ll be mixed by the end of February at Jack The Bear’s studio in Melbourne, and once they’re all done and dusted, they’ll be ready to master.

A mockup of the 38mm square badges.

It’ll take around eight weeks to produce the physical rewards, like the vinyl, but everything else will be making its way to you as soon as is humanly possible.

Vinyl mastering £300

Vinyl production £1,640

Vinyl cutting £300

Vinyl mailers £110

Other rewards £100

Postage £600 (based on mailing 100 to both the UK and the rest of the world)

Grand total £3,000 (give or take £50)

For a stretch goal, if I reach £3,500 I’ll include a 12″ lyric sheet with each vinyl:

A mockup of the vinyl paper insert and lyric sheet.

I firmly believe in the power of crowdfunding. I’ve pledged for a ton of projects on Kickstarter, Pozible, and Patreon. I even work for a crowdfunding platform, Unbound, which helps authors get their books published.

I’ve come up with some wild rewards, from the micro to the major, and I couldn’t be more amped. None of the money pledged is for profit—everything is to ensure I can release the best possible record. One For Sorrow, Two For Joy has been over a year in the making, from London to Reykjavík to Melbourne and a ton of places in between. It has been an absolute labour of love, and I can’t wait to share it with you.